as being in their own nature the complex result of what is expressed in the very abstract laws of the simpler components, we have still to recognise as the determining feature the special combination there presented. There is no real antithesis, no incompatibility, between the two ways in which we thus represent the concrete facts of experience. Their character as combinations plays so important a part in real experience that, even if we accept in its entirety the view that each portion of this concrete whole is capable of explanation by reference to the general laws of its simple components, we do not remove the necessity which the facts impose on us, of continuing to represent them in their concreteness.1

The primitive notions are undoubtedly applied at first in directions where the content which we afterwards assign to them has no real application. It is only the abstractness, the lack of discrimination, which attaches to our primitive notions that enables us to overlook the discrepancies which increased knowledge forces on our attention. Thus, for example, the practical thought of causal agency as the production of change by a personal agent must be conceived only in the vaguest way, when it is applied to all the changes which enter into perceptive experience. No sooner do we become able to reflect on what is implied in such a notion than we find that a modification of it must be introduced if it is to apply to the orderly uniform succession of events in outer fact. But the notion itself, it must be remembered, has its general significance only as enabling the subject to put together his experience, to retain it in a coherent form in his consciousness.

1 Obviously, this consideration becomes of special importance when the concrete subject is the self-conscious individual. The combination has there a form so characteristic, so im

The extension or modi

portant as determining the series of events that follow from the subject, that it cannot possibly be dismissed as imperfect and transitional.

fication it undergoes does not in any way alter this implicit function of the notion; and, in respect to the category of Cause, the extension and modification it receives still continue to exhibit the same function: we represent the causal connexion as that order of change in outer events which enables each alteration to be regarded as the outcome of what has preceded. Fundamentally it is the same thought. And, if we gradually become able to advance further, and to say, with respect to the alteration in outer fact, that it consists in a certain quantitative amount of a special kind of change, and if thereby we determine as the explanatory cause a preceding quantitative amount of like kind of change, we are still proceeding in the light of the general function of every notion that it enables us to keep together the parts of our experience as a coherent connected whole. The primitive mind and advanced scientific thought represent the same function, and with equal satisfaction to themselves.

Put in more technical form, this would signify that these primitive categories of practice gradually altered in content in and through the increase of perceptive experience and the power of analysing it into its more simple components. The development in the categories or general thoughts, and the alteration in the total representation of perceptive experience, go hand-in-hand. If our representations of the concrete and of its relations-space and time-are vague and indeterminate, equally vague will be the content of the generalised thoughts or categories which we apply.

Thus, then, it must be said that, in a sense, there is no ultimate criterion to which we can appeal as testing the worth of the general notions by the help of which we interpret our experience. Experience alone is the criterion. And, if it be allowed that in all our reasoning we proceed by applying general principles, we must remember that the process is by no means that of deducing from such general

principles what is already contained in them.

Rather it is a

constant process of testing, modifying, and, it may be, enriching the principles themselves. In this general conclusion it is implied that we cannot reconcile with the actual course of human thinking and experience that representation, which Aristotle was the first to give, of demonstration or reasoning as resting upon a definite set of first principles. Aristotle's conception of a number of principles, from which there. could be completely deduced the properties of concrete things, represents, as it rests upon, a wholly erroneous conception of the real nature of development. It is applicable only to that conception of development which assumes that the nature of what develops precedes as a completed fact the attainment of its own end - a view which is characteristic not of Aristotle only, but of the Idealist philosophy in general.

INDEX.